Ever since the dawn of the world wide web, to give it its old-fashioned moniker, our communications have been beset by spam. We ignore it almost as much as we receive it, but around the turn of the century Mammon's pursuit of our attention led to an extraordinary coupling with the Muse.

Equally intriguing was the trend Wired magazine identified in 2006 as "empty spam": Spam Lit messages that were, paradoxically, all lit and no spam. The consensus among geeks is that they were probably "misfires" due to faulty server connections. To their recipients, however, these instances of found poetry - often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty - seemed, in Myers' words, like "scriptures from the future" or "postcards from another planet". Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau's Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.

Although published last year, Amerika's work was written in 2004, which also happens to be the year when Myers and Ranaldo penned their first spoems. None of them were aware that others were doing similar things at the same time. There must have been something in the air. If my inbox is anything to go by, however, Spam Lit is now on the wane, so the time may have come to assess the merits of spoetry, its literary by-product. Beyond the genre's obvious affinities with automatic writing, cut-ups, constrained writing (of the Oulipian variety) and found poetry, is it any cop?